tcl/tk/itcl/itk/tix

[James Ingham <jingham@cygnus.com>]

Andrew,

 > Hi all.
 > 
 > I'm currently trying to package insight for debian, and have run
 > across a slight snag.
 > 
 > My original intent was to link insight against the pre-packaged
 > versions of all of the above.  That was, until I noticed the "CYGNUS
 > LOCAL" patches to all of the above.
 > 
 > Is there any intention to merge these changes with the main branches
 > of the above, or will insight remain dependent on forked versions of
 > these libraries?  

The intent is to merge changes back into the net versions whenever
possible.  However, there are several impediments that slow this down.

1) We are currently using Tcl8.0, and have some fixes to Tcl 8.0 that
we need...  But Scriptics is no longer working on Tcl8.0, so there
really isn't a way for us to get our changes merged into the "official 
distribution".  

We need to move up to Tcl8.2, but that will take some work, which we
haven't had time to do yet.  A lot of the fixes that we have made to
Tcl/Tk are for Cygwin.  We will have to also convince the Scriptics
folks to get sufficiently interested in Cygwin to accept these
patches.  That part should only effect the source distributions,
however.  There are some other bug fixes that we have to check against 
the 8.1 version, and submit if they are not fixed yet, etc...

2) There really is no official maintainer of Tix, so far as I can
tell, and we have had to fix a bunch of bugs in Tix.  In the long run
we indent to phase out our use of Tix, since it is pretty much
abandoned, but we can't do that until we cook up replacements for the
few widgets we use out of there.

3) I patched the Iwidgets and submitted the patches to the
maintainers, but they have not been accepted yet.  This is not such a
big deal, I could just rip this Tcl code out into our libgui or
something. 

This is probably more detail than you wanted, I imagine, but...  The
high-order bit is yes, we intend to be comptible with the net versions 
of Tcl/Tk/Itcl, but it will have to wait till we convert to Tcl/Tk 8.2.

Tix will be a problem for as long as we continue to use it.

By the way, thanks for making up the package!

Jim

 > 
 > My initial (quick hack) package was an 8 meg .deb, due mostly to the
 > tcl/tk duplication.
 > 
 > Cheers,
 > --Andrew
 > 

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Jim Ingham                                              jingham@cygnus.com
Cygnus Solutions Inc.